Which states are voting differently from demographic projections? Harry Enten over at FiveThirtyEight spots the outlier and seeks to explain the differences. Let me add a couple of thoughts. The two states where Donald Trump seems to be doing better than past election results and demographics suggest are Iowa and Nevada.
In Iowa Enten notes that non-college whites started trending Republican in 2014. In addition, the Iowa Republican Party, out-organized by the Iowa Democratic Party in the past, seems to have been doing the out-organizing lately, as reflected in the fact that more Iowans participated in the Republican than in the Democratic precinct caucuses in February.
Enten notes that in Nevada even college-graduate whites are pro-Trump in polls. Back in a March Washington Examiner column I argued that Trump support was inversely correlated with social connectedness or social capital. Nevada, by the scholar Robert Putnam’s reckoning, ranks 50th among the 50 states in social connectedness. Alexis de Tocqueville, who first noted Americans’ tendency to participate in voluntary associations — the very definition of social connectedness — never went to Las Vegas.
The two states where Trump seems to be running worse than past elections results and demographics suggest are Kansas and Utah.
Most of us think of Kansas as a predominantly rural state, with mile after mile of farms. But as in other Great Plains states, population in Kansas is increasingly concentrated in a few urban areas. Prime among them is Johnson County, the most affluent and high-education county in the two-state Kansas City metropolitan area, which long since has outnumbered industrial and minority-heavy Wyandotte County, which includes Kansas City, Kansas.
Going back to the 1990s, Johnson County has had fractious Republican primaries, pitting pro-lifers against culturally more liberal Republicans, many of whom have voted Democratic in general elections when their candidates lost. It’s a good bet that many such Johnson County voters are not supporting Donald Trump and voting for Hillary Clinton instead. This makes a difference statewide, for one simple reason: Johnson County cast 24 percent of Kansas’s votes in November 2012. Defections by Johnson County 2012 Romney voters are probably the main reason Kansas is not as strong for Trump as demographics and voting history would suggest.
Finally, majority-Mormon Utah. Mormons, perhaps the American demographic group with the highest social-connectedness, have been repelled by Donald Trump, who got only 14 percent in Utah’s caucuses. Mormons remember that members of their church were once persecuted; they pride themselves on their command of foreign languages (learned often as Mormon missionaries abroad) and their welcoming of immigrants. My bet is that Utah has a higher percentage of non-Hispanics who are fluent in Spanish than any other state. Trump is currently running ahead in Utah polls, but with not much more than half of the 73 percent Mitt Romney won there in 2012.
Bottom line: the political map of red and blue states that we’re all so familiar with is changing, just a bit, and I think it’s clearer now than in March that social connectedness, or lack thereof, helps to explain at least some of the changes.
